China's Giant New Warplane Will Look Awfully Familiar to the U.S. Air Force

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China's Giant New Warplane Will Look Awfully Familiar to the U.S. Air Force

An Air Force C-17 delivers relief supplies to China in 2008.

Photo: Air Force

In what has become an almost annual Christmas tradition, the Chinese military has released the first blurry photos of a brand-new warplane prototype – in this case, Beijing's first home-built heavy transport. It closely resembles other aircraft in its class including, most notably, the U.S. Air Force's workhorse C-17.

In theory, the new plane could give China the same global military reach the U.S. enjoys thanks it its own huge transport force. But as usual with new Chinese planes, at this early stage there are more questions than answers. Especially since prototypes can appear impressive without being actually useful.

The jet-powered, four-engine cargo plane, reportedly designated Y-20, can be seen on the ground in a series of photos apparently snapped at long range at the Xian Aircraft Corporation's Yanliang airfield in east-central China and posted to popular Internet forums. Although portrayed as the work of enthusiasts, postings on these forums are often scripted by the Chinese government as a way of building excitement about new weapons developments. And sure enough, the Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed that it was developing the plane on Thursday: "To meet the needs of the national economy and social development, and in the service of military modernization, betterdisaster relief, humanitarian relief and other emergency tasks, our country is developing a large transport aircraft."

A leaked image of China's new transport plane. Photo via

The Aviationist

Chinese and U.S. sources have estimated the Y-20's weight at around 200 tons, making it slightly smaller than the Boeing-made C-17 and somewhat larger than the European A400M. It appears to be powered by Russian D-30 engines, which not coincidentally also propel China's small fleet of Russian-built Il-76 aerial freighters. It also appears to have a nose similar to the one on the Russian Antonov An-70. China habitually fits older Russian engines to its new prototype aircraft until it can make new, purpose-built motors.

For years, analysts and trade journalists have been alluding to a new Chinese transport plane. The aircraft apparently began development around 2005. Just three years later a massive earthquake devastated Sichuan province, killing tens of thousands – and possibly accelerating the Y-20's design and construction.

In the quake's aftermath the People's Liberation Army Air Force was unable to deploy more than a handful of transport planes to haul relief supplies. "Poor air relief efforts have exposed a significant crack in the PLAAF ability to respond to major challenges," Nirav Patel wrote in Joint Forces Quarterly.

The Americans, however, managed to send a couple C-17s full of supplies – an obvious embarrassment for the Chinese. "The Chinese respond to embarrassments in very focused ways," Navy undersecretary Robert Work, then a Washington, D.C. defense analyst, told Danger Room at the time.

In the years following the earthquake, Beijing made disaster relief capabilities "a new priority" (.pdf) for the PLA, RAND analyst Roger Cliff told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. As the Y-20's development made progress, in 2009 a model of the new plane appeared at a Chinese trade show. Around the same time, China also began pouring billions of dollars into developing a homemade turbofan engine specifically for large transports.

Just two years later the first Y-20 prototype was ready for its first photo shoot, although it's not clear when the giant plane might fly for the first time.

Nor is it clear to what extent Beijing based the new aircraft on stolen American blueprints. Whenever a new Chinese warplane appears, foreign observers claim it's a ripoff of a U.S., Russian, European or Israeli design. They're not always wrong. The PLA possesses unlicensed copies of Russia's Su-27 and Su-30 fighters.

In 2010 a U.S. district judge sentenced Chinese-born Dongfan Chung, a Boeing engineer, to 15 years for giving Beijing classified data on U.S. rocket technology. Chung was also accused of passing along information on the C-17, although the feds ultimately dropped that charge.

The Y-20 does bear a strong resemblance to the C-17, although to be fair many transports are outwardly similar.

In any case, the mere appearance of prototype plane says little about its actual military potential – especially where cargo aircraft are concerned. Unlike, say, stealth fighters, transports are meant to fly frequent, lengthy, unglamorous missions where efficiency is more important than raw kinetic performance.

To a great extent, an airplane's efficiency is a function of its engines. That makes transport-optimized turbofans "arguably more technologically challenging overall" compared to fighter engines, according to analysts Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson. And yet China has struggled for years to produce even the latter. It could be years before the Y-20 has its own custom motors and, as a consequence, is able to perform at its best.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, already has decades of experience developing and flying many thousands of large cargo planes, steadily building a huge body of knowledge. This year, for example, the Air Force devised a new flying formation for C-17s modeled on the behavior of birds, resulting in a 10 percent fuel savings.

China possesses little equivalent knowledge. And that's likely to show when the new Y-20 eventually takes flight.